First day of lockdown, a deserted city. Wandering through the abandoned streets, not knowing what’s the right attitude to adopt. The politicians dictate rules to follow. The unheard-of dimension of the pandemic is the context. What is at stake is profit and loss. For the first time, a plague threatens the global community. No way out. We all share the same fear, uncertainty, fragility, and impotence.
Faceless figures occupy abstract spaces. Psycho-geography of the city: worried, fleeing passersby; imposed distance between bodies; anguish of those who have nowhere to hide. Defenseless, wounded beings. Going into forgotten territories where life hides, on the fringes of social life, where those without homes, junkies, and prostitutes continue to live despite the lack of access to commodities.
Over the days, behaviors change, becoming more aggressive. Repression toughens on those who cannot attest to an “honorable” function. A farce of rules and regulations. To walk, to photograph, during weeks and months. Gestures—not words or ideas—define what one is. To make my own rules, live under my principles, make my way through the darkness. Struggles, doubts, risks, mistakes, refusals to compromise. The difficulty is to stay lucid, responsible, and independent. To go as far as my strength allows.
Lockdown. Tension growing. Authoritarian figures: medics, cops, journalists, guards. The urge to document more than the surface of things, to look at beings and objects from the inside. Seeing too much. The situation is not spectacular but extreme. To experience a reality that is violent but imperceptible to the naked eye. Facing a non-tangible threat.
Thermography—a technology invented by astronomers and developed by the military to locate and monitor deviant figures—disembodies its subjects by stripping them of their envelope of flesh and the singularity of their features. Yet it can also become a tool for a sensual quest for the essence of beings, measuring the heat radiated by humans and buildings, rendering them permeable to vision. It expresses porosity and vulnerability, capturing the fever of the living and transforming it into light waves.
The mystery of incarnation is replayed on the very surface of these images, the camera apprehending the viral nature of superstition and giving tangible form to the dissolution of identities and the obscenity of the economic context. The photographs reveal tension and the collapse of bodies, their fever both symptom and symbol. The thermal camera measures body heat, which becomes proof of the drive to resist and survive. Distorted thermal images, glowing with luminous halos, create a connection to invisible truths.
In a frenzy, moments of agony are recorded in spaces where all physical contact is now prohibited. The low resolution of these electronic files, almost a sacrifice, translates an entire spectrum of intensities. They reach a certain level of abstraction, searching for other realities, undoing the fabric of our senses, portraying a space and time where life and death merge. Fear lingers.
To walk the streets feels like a privilege. No gestures link bodies anymore; no tangible social bonds remain. Flesh is abandoned to its solitude. In hospitals and on streets plunged into silence, recumbent figures and penitents appear everywhere. Within the hermetic space of the intensive care unit, the aim is not to contemplate the spectacle of suffering but to capture the fragility of humanity: its medical rituals, its desperation. Suddenly, an abyss opens in these small lives, swallowing them into darkness.
The pity, the empathy, the inability to keep death away. The graphic dimension of bedridden and intubated flesh dissolved into a kind of luminous abstraction. The flesh becomes spectra of light detached against a background of darkness. Troubling gentleness—or sensuality—of the caregivers’ gestures. The transparency of the figures and buildings isolates them even more in the unfathomable abstraction that reality has become.
Multiple vision of those apparently identical lives. The effort is monumental. Having experienced them as unique and unrepeatable. To stay alive after that terrible revelation, leaving always little burning figures knowing that this fire is not exhausted with my departure. Every day dying, being the mirror of death. There is no life left inside of me. Compassion kills. Unbearable pain of having shared all those lives. Regenerating the desire to live with chemistry.
Outside, lonely beings struggle to inhabit an uninhabitable space. Homeless beings scrambling to survive; the last men in a world that has lost what made up our common humanity. The thermal images convey despair, the sense of a lost humanity. Endless accumulation of atheistic ex-votos. Each single day, picking the camera up and going into the belly of the city. The void. The senseless drive to go always deeper. Not to give up, not to be confined. To live the present through the old paradigms of collaboration and resistance, feel it is my privilege and my responsibility to experience a possible apocalypse. The movements of bodies in space, their isolation and desperate drive to exist.
The images contradict the idea of photography as we know it, undermine the lazy assumption that photography deals with the excellency of the gaze regarding the composition or the light. It is not a matter of looking any more. Photography, to resist the force of the spectacle becomes again the language of action.
Alienated by the pleasures of immediate possession, they become, always more, spectators of their own lives. They unknowingly support the insidious ideology of a global culture that instill passivity and cowardice. Violence, inequalities, threats, misinformation, manipulation, curfews, controls, fear, accumulation of deaths, prologue to a civil war to come. The principle of violence runs our societies.
The pandemic exaggerates the disparities between individuals, social classes and nations. No other choice than taking part in the turmoil. Meaningful and necessary gestures that redefine my destiny. Through photographs, instantaneous art forms generated at the very moment of the experience that provokes them.
Too much is not enough. The only strategy is excess, to unveil and keep at large the cowards, cynics and corrupts, the clones and the rats. To pursue fear, desire, lust for existence. Viral images, deviant artistic gestures, performed out of the state of poverty.
The isolation, the fragility, the burden on the emotional and psychological state, the episodes of rage, of fear, of paranoia, the extreme fatigue of the muscles, the silence. The morgue. Nothing more explicit than a mute body. Closeness to death becomes bearable.
Not to open eyes to horror, but to let horror contaminate the flesh and the mind, holding oneself responsible for the effort of not giving up, of reaching decency, whatever the cost or the damage will be. No other way of living.
The rest is all lies. Vida nude, bare life, humanity reduced to its most basic form, the abjection of physical death—caused by a pernicious virus—or social death—caused by anonymous financial interests. Readiness to absorb and be absorbed by the violence, the essential force of the artist. Techniques and aesthetics are anecdotes. Police and sanitary rules are a specific context, a condition of the necessity to resist passivity.
There are no victims, only guilty individuals. Consumers and spectators guilty for giving in to the spectacle, for not having the courage to set free from the illusory certitude that condemns them to impotence. The imposture is to understand, to feel, to preach the good and the light and not to dare to go into the night. They ignore suffering, not knowing how to differentiate the victims through their names and their features. Photographing a physical position, to tell a perspective as an existential being and a social entity.
Struggling to provoke an inter-contamination between the language and the situations that generate it, aiming to make images that are no longer a parasitic trace of the event but a proof of living through rage and desire, working within the system of information and against it. Rejecting the status of a passive voyeur or witness, being a full-share character of the documented experiences. Surviving the horror and my insanity. To consider the pandemic through the political prism—through the inhibition of personal freedoms, the hidden imperatives and strategies of economic war and class struggle—rather than as a medical crisis.
To focus on the horror of the present, of the instant. Reality principle. Ability of the mind to assess the reality of the external world, and to act upon it accordingly, as opposed to acting on the pleasure principle. To look at what they don’t dare to look at, to go to territories they don’t dare to go to. Apprehending contemporary existence as a slow death, an agony they choose to deny, anesthetizing the pain through entertainment, desperately trying not to feel the pain nor to face the horror.
Words are part of the process. So alternative lectures can be generated out of the inflation of information. Mutant diagnostics, dissident strategies of resistance. Reality takes slowly the familiar shape the photographs renounce and it is scary, always. But it keeps being a privilege to experience violence in my flesh. Deliberately walking into the darkness, provoking situations that challenge common certitudes in order to get away from the temptation of prostration.
Obedience is produced by the virtual spectacle that made addicted consumers out of exploited workers and resigned slaves out of despaired victims. Pain, fear, desire, crime and fleeting passions allow the rebellious to surpass the unbearable burden of economic survival imposed upon defenseless excess and disposable margins of population. Those who own nothing but their own physical life are deprived of their existence. Aware of their condition, of their own ruin. A devastating obscenity that no public servant will acknowledge. Art is vain, an image little more than a scream or a sigh of stupefaction as life fades away.
In a world reduced to false and futile pretenses, in the absence of perspective, in the reign of flesh subject to exhaustion and prostrated souls forced into the void, action might be pointless, doomed to fail under the curse of financial cruelty, but is the last resort of a forgotten dignity. Action as the antidote to infectious passivity, to painless drifting into inertia. No answer to be found, but not to give up. Having to set the spectator up, and damage him, to force him to look at what he didn’t want to see. All forms of communication are a compromise but affirming the sinister rule of merchandise and the disappearance of experience is imperative. Keeping the pain alive, an ultimate form of insubordination. Financial violence administers and annihilates large sections of marginalized communities perceived as a non-productive and therefore disposable. Consciousness gives up to the virtualization of communication. Under the misleading disguise of liberal and democratic rule, financial ideology promotes resigned comfort as a principle of existence. Contamination becomes a sign of the determination with which men undertake to annihilate men. Survival mutates into crime and deviance. Lust denies religious superstition. Expenditure dissolves the sole logics of profit and consumerism. Cruelty proving to be the last possible mean to resist the void. Art as a solitary, innocent, impossible pursuit of truth.
A perpetual search for ever excessive sensations, situations and experiences. Ignoring the limits through insane strategies, renouncing impossible positions to take in the silent struggle between the forces of abstraction—spectacle, profit, reason, etc.—and the mechanics of the flesh—pleasure, rage, instinct, etc. Immersing myself deeper into the doubt, as long as the flesh bears the pain. Challenge the mental and physical boundaries of life. Destroying certainties and polluting minds. Living up to my words. The artistic act becomes the equivalent of the act of living itself.